Samsung 990 PRO 2TB vs Silicon Power A60 2TB

The 990 PRO is the alternative to the SN850X rather than an upgrade over it, and choosing between them is mostly about whose controller and software you want. Samsung rates it at 7,450 MB/s read and 6,900 MB/s write on its own Elpis controller with a dedicated DRAM cache, which puts it at the top of the Gen4 field on paper.

Where Samsung genuinely differentiates is the ownership tooling. Magician handles firmware updates, health and endurance monitoring, secure erase and over-provisioning from one application, and Samsung has a longer record of shipping firmware updates for drives already in the field than most competitors. For a drive holding your OS, that matters more than a few hundred MB/s.

The practical notes are the same as the WD. There is no heatsink on this listing, so a motherboard heatsink or an aftermarket one is assumed, and a PS5 needs one. Samsung sells a heatsink variant separately, which is the version to buy for a console. And the honest limit is the same as the whole category: against the SN850X in this guide, the difference is a specification rather than something you will notice in use.

This is the drive you buy when what you want is capacity, not speed. It uses TLC NAND rather than the slower QLC that turns up on a lot of budget drives, which matters because QLC drives fall further and recover more slowly once their cache is exhausted.

Day to day it does the job. Windows boots quickly, games load at a speed you would not distinguish from a Gen4 drive without a stopwatch, and large copies run fast until the SLC write cache fills. That is the moment the compromise appears: without a DRAM cache the drive falls back on borrowing system memory, and sustained write speed drops noticeably and stays down until the drive catches up.

The other limits follow from Gen3. Rated at roughly 2,200 MB/s read, it is roughly a third of the peak the two Gen4 drives here quote, and it is not a drive to put in a PS5 where Sony specifies a higher minimum. On the positive side it runs cool and draws little power, which makes it a reasonable laptop or small-form-factor drive where the Gen4 options need airflow.